Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Medtronic has always performed controlled clinical trials to check out the safety and performance of its medical devices. But this time, it’s doing something more.

Dublin-based Medtronic has signed a data-sharing agreement with Mercy, the fifth largest Catholic health system in the U.S. Under the terms of the agreement, the two are establishing a new data sharing and analysis network intended to help gather clinical evidence for medical device innovation, the company said.

Working with Mercy Technology Services, Medtronic will capture de-identified data from about 80,000 Mercy patients with heart failure. The device maker will use that data to explore real-world factors governing their response to Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy, a heart failure treatment option which helps some patients.

Medtronic believes that the de-identified patient data Mercy supplies could help improve device performance, according to Dr. Rick Kuntz, senior vice president of strategic scientific operations with Medtronic. “Having the ability to study patient care pathways and conditions before and after exposure to a medical device is crucial to understanding how those devices perform outside of controlled clinical trial setting,” said Kuntz in a prepared statement.

For example, earlier this year Google announced that it was expanding its partnerships with three high-profile academic medical centers under which they work to better analyze clinical data. According to Healthcare IT News, the partners will examine how machine learning can be used in clinical settings to sift through EMR data and find ways to improve outcomes.

“Advanced machine learning is mature enough to start accurately predicting medical events – such as whether patients will be hospitalized, how long they will stay, and whether the health is deteriorating despite treatment for conditions such as urinary tract infections, pneumonia, or heart failure,” said Google Brain Team researcher Katherine Chou in a blog post.

As with Mercy, the academic medical centers are sharing de-identified data. Chou says that offers plenty of information. “Machine learning can discover patterns in de-identified medical records to predict what is likely to happen next, and thus, anticipate the needs of the patients before they arise,” she wrote.

It’s worth pointing out that “de-identification” refers to a group of techniques for patient data protection which, according to NIST, include suppression of personal identifiers, replacing personal identifiers with an average value for the entire group of data, reporting personal identifiers as being within a given range, exchanging personal identifiers other information and swapping data between records.

It may someday become an issue when someone mixes up de-identification (which makes it quite difficult to define specific patients) and anonymization, a subcategory of de-identification whereby data can never be re-identified. Such confusion would, in short, be bad, as the difference between “de-identified” and “anonymized” matters.

In the meantime, though, de-identified data seems likely to help a wide variety of healthcare organizations do better work. As long as patient data stays private, much good can come of partnerships like the one underway at Mercy.